St. Maximos' Hut

Mark Steyn has a fascinating column today, in which he draws an analogy between the behavior of characters in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, The Tragedy of the Korosko, and the Fox journalists recently kidnapped in Gaza. Set in Egypt, the novel describes a party of Anglo-American-French tourists taken hostage by the Mahdists, who Steyn calls the "jihadi of the day" and offered the choice of conversion to Islam or death. The tourists are described as follows by Doyle:

"None of them, except perhaps Miss Adams and Mrs. Belmont, had any deep religious convictions. All of them were children of this world, and some of them disagreed with everything which that symbol upon the earth represented."

Steyn then says:

"That symbol" is the cross. Yet in the end, even as men with no religious convictions, they cannot bring themselves to submit to Islam, for they understand it to be not just a denial of Christ but in some sense a denial of themselves, too. So they stall and delay and bog down the imam in a lot of technical questions until eventually he wises up and they're condemned to death.

After drawing a further analogy to Faust, Steyn concludes

In the Muslim world, they watch the Centanni/Wiig video and see men so in love with the present, the now, that they will do or say anything to live in the moment. And they draw their own conclusions -- that these men are easier to force into the car than that 16-year-old girl in Sydney was. It doesn't matter how "understandable" Centanni and Wiig's actions are to us, what the target audience understands is quite different: that there is nothing we're willing to die for. And, to the Islamist mind, a society with nothing to die for is already dead.

I hadn't heard of the novel before, but it sounds like one to read and reflect upon.